Robert A. Ferguson: Alone in America, the Stories
that Matter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Alone in America
addresses the impact of aloneness in U.S. culture through
representative works of American fiction. The book is not an
exploration in sociology but an attempt to identify
what author Ferguson calls "the moments when the space between
loneliness and solitude disappears," and finds these moments best
explored in works contrived for the purpose.

Ferguson identifies the forces confronted by the
characters of American fiction as those Emerson might have labeled "the
lords of life": failure, betrayal, change, defeat, breakdown, fear,
difference, age, and loss. These experiential factors emphatically
define the divide between involuntary loneliness and voluntary solitude
-- that tenuous state of "aloneness."

In a provocative prologue, Ferguson describes Toqueville as
the first observer to describe American individualism as "social
fragmentation, distrust, suspicion, a leveling presentism." Toqueville
saw Americans as permanently separated from themselves, their roots,
origins, purpose, and identity. In his famous essay "Self-Reliance,"
Emerson turned this phenomenon into ideological boast:

Let me admonish you, first
of all, to go alone, to refuse the good models, even those most sacred
to the imagination of men. ... Absolve you of yourself. Nothing is at
last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

To fellow erudites and transcendentalists, this advice
represents a core American individualism, but in fact proposed the
negative effect of justifying American fragmentation, ego, and
alienation already inherit in the nation's character. Emerson's imagined
individual Self, with its innate sense of cultural integrity, was eventually
refuted by pragmatism, sociology, and psychology, but was tellingly
ignorant of the floundering of American individualism caused by the
historical thrust of frontier, race, genocide, already present in Emerson's
day -- and by the vicissitudes of the "lords of life."

The first social casualty of American individualism and
social vice was domesticity, the loss of
home, identity, and continuity. Social vice dissolved the
confident self of Emerson. Ferguson sets out to show how fiction
highlights the options of distressed characters in this
social context. Nearly all fiction represents solitary heroes, but
American fiction shows unsuccessful ones consistent with
American society and cultural values.

Ferguson helpfully returns to the subject of the prologue with
a midpoint comment (between chapters 5 and 6) on Emerson's evolved ideas in the essay "Experience."
He caps this useful train of thought with a concluding reflection (chapter 10) on
Whitman's similar turn. Meanwhile, nine chapters survey representative
American fiction and characters embedded in aloneness. (What follows are the chapter topics, not the chapter
titles):

1. In Irving, Rip Van Winkle is a homeless solitary and
scorned alcoholic rescued by his family. Written in 1819, Ferguson notes
that this epoch (1800-1830) had the highest rate of alcoholism in
American history. The supposedly amusing tale is a story as much of
American awakening from colonial capacity to bewildered republic beset
by intractable problems. But who will take pity on a whole nation as a
sot?

2. The decline in social consensus by 1832 is dramatized by
Hawthorne's story of betrayal. A boy is betrayed by his family, walks
to a city where his uncle will take him in, but upon arrival
finds his hapless uncle being led, tarred and feathered, down a
street by a jeering mob. Betrayal is endemic because, as Ferguson puts
it, "people easily tolerate a level of injustice when it is imposed on
others."

3. Alcott and Twain present post-Civil War stories of youth
contrasted as the insular developing child (Alcott) and the homeless one living
on his wits, hopes, and fears (Twain). But both novelists, despite their
apparent extremes, perceive society as moral depravity. Their
protagonists must follow a chaotic moral journey towards adulthood,
characterized by loss and aloneness.

4. The female protagonists in James and Hurston are
"defeated by people close to them, and must grow beyond the problem
while still defined through it by others." As women, they are
vulnerable to manipulation and circumscribed by their culture, upheld
by unscrupulous men. Their aloneness is constructed by society a priori.

5. The 1907 Fruit
of the Tree by Wharton is an extension of the James and
Hurston focus on a female protagonist, here dwelling in the world of
illness and pain, the isolation of the caregiving role, and
"domesticity undone." The protagonist is "defined by her vulnerability
in the solitude and supportive role that an intense patient
relationship requires." Her strength is to act correctly, courageously,
without reference to consequences, though for women that is impossible.

Midpoint. Under the rubric of "the lords of life
revisited," Ferguson revisits the mature Emerson in the
latter's essay "Experience." Emerson has lived through the deaths of
his wife, a close brother, and his beloved son. His exuberance and
faith in self-reliance is exhausted. "Life itself is a bubble and a
skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep," he writes. It is "a flitting state, a tent
for a night." Contrast this resignation with the grand
optimism of his "transparent eyeball" theme in "Self-Reliance," where
the whole world awaits the individualist's conquest.

6. The immigrant novel with its broader social context
accentuates the alienation that undermines the first generation's hope
in America. A fear of the unknown and the loss of the familiar
characterize the immigrant. In Henry Roth's book, a child is speechless
in his developing years, characterizing the depth of unarticulated
fears in his adult brethren. Little David walks the streets in panic
and calculates reasons not to pursue interests, not to reveal himself.
Only in sleep is there found the quieting of the trauma and solitude the
protagonist suffers.

7. Race has undermined American society not only through race
hatred but by the indissoluable historical reality of slavery and power.
In Faulkner, the southern plantation is the lurid progenitor of a
self-destructive world-view. Faulkner's protagonist embodies "that
solitude of contempt and distrust which success brings to him who
gained it because he was strong instead of merely lucky." But that
solitude is the nemesis that, through race, destroys him.

Morrison revisits the plantation South from a black
perspective, depicting how slavery forever destroys families and relationships, all
made meaningfulness in the struggling protagonists. What more profound
aloneness in American history fictionalized than this profound loss of domesticity?

8. Saul Bellow's aging protagonist is a prototype of the late
20th-century U.S., an immigrant never absorbed by the prevalent
culture, suffering threats at once physical, social, economic, and medical. He
clings to a conventional wisdom despite the vicissitudes that tend to
isolate him. His guiding principle in aging, as he sees death all
around him, is to maintain his character.

9. Delillos' characters are consummate modern urbanites,
fragmented in relationships, coping with solitude. The image of a man
jumping from one of the burning towers on September 11, 2001, propels
the novel's characters to reflect on the image of falling, descending,
declining, dying, that seems embedded in their own lives and actions.

In Robinson's Gilead,
the dying man suffers the regrets of a younger wife and unreconciled
sons. The novel's circumscribed domestic, rural setting and
characters nevertheless strike a note about the universality of
aloneness in the American landscape, even when the surface projects
love and contentment.

10. In his final chapter, Ferguson reviews Whitman.
Analogous to Emerson, Whitman's early work "Song to Myself" extols youth,
physicality, ego. But witnessing horrors in war beyond his own sense of
fear and discretion, then entering age, illness, and isolation,
Whitman's Specimen
Days addresses the question of the past and of oblivion,
his repute as a writer, his critics, and his own tortured formula of
reconciliation to life. The "specimens" are the parts of the past, his writings,
and each must be let go, with the last thought that they at least made
some connection to humanity. As Ferguson puts it, "The loneliness and
fear of the writer turn into the solitude that he shares with all
future readers who stop to appreciate the effort he has given."

Conclusion

Ferguson has searched for new extensions of involuntary and
voluntary solitude carefully elicited from American fiction and from
the lives of the characters presented. Alone in America is
a thoughtful consideration and an original and insightful review of a
subtle and fruitful field of interest.